~ omne trium perfectum

Monthly Archives: November 2011

I’ve been out of Hollywood for a while and my feet know this—they feel the dirt of the sidewalks. My lungs noticeably breathe in the car exhaust. I even flinch when men too tall or too burly casually walk toward me, heading down Vine, knowing what they must know, going where they must go; not giving a shit about me. But I give a shit. I notice. I’ve been gone too long. I care. I worry. Every bout of Tourette’s throws me into a minor frenzy of fear. Oh Hollywood. Oh Hollywood, you crazy, wild beast of a city.

It’s been nearly six months and new restaurants have sprouted as if someone dumped a gallon of fertilizer upon them. Bookstores have died. I’m not sure where Bob is—perhaps he moved from Franklin to Ivar near the Library. Perhaps he packed up his grocery cart and scooted off to somewhere that I can’t even imagine. I noticed that the newsstand shrank and that Japanese place closed its doors for good. My sister will be sad (she had her first date with her husband there). But things change. She packed up all of her little boxes and labeled them with words like “Bathroom”, “Kitchen” and “Breakables” and she moved home. Oleg moved across town, Matt to Ohio, Meg to the country. Friendships have fizzled. Things change.

But today I am meeting Alice who still lives on Yucca. We are going to see a movie that will make us weep aloud inside of the theatre. We are going to eat chocolate and drink coffee. So we are walking down Cahuenga and I see Steve and that one guy that use to order a double cappuccino. So maybe things aren’t too different. Maybe, just maybe, I can still call it home after all.

Untouchable innocence. Nothing else comes to mind whenever this movie is the subject… whenever this story is the subject, anyway.

I’ve mistakenly undermined the success of Revolutionary Road in my head and blamed it on a false idea of a somewhat faulty chemistry between the once more than perfect couple Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. I would say ‘yes, they were separately genius-like, god-like, almost so certain of their failure as the young Wheelers there was little left for the eventual book reader to figure out for him/herself… but as a couple on screen? Didn’t quite make it’.

I was terribly wrong.

After maybe the fifth or sixth time I saw this movie (kill me now) I realized something I had missed the very first time I watched it: April wasn’t necessarily in love with Frank.

Take a deep breath… ready? Ok.

She wasn’t. She was in love with the idea of Frank. Much like any of us, the difference is that since it’s a movie and we (read I) try to romanticize the encounter between the two of them to an extreme that is almost certainly unrealistic.

But hey, Alice, wake up! Revolutionary Road is incredibly realistic.

A couple of slightly dreamy misfits, in the hopes of finding an unique type of life together by romanticizing their own and brief spark of perfect union, find nothing but the broken mirror they had been staring at their entire lives, before their weary eyes. Yes, there was love, but a kind of love that was never realized. The young Wheelers never allowed to expose who they truly were to each other, such the grandeur behind the romance they created for themselves: the only feeling that kept them going.

There was never supposed to be chemistry… there was never supposed to be romance beyond that of which lives only in dreams. With that in mind, this movie couldn’t possibly be any… better.

I’m not a pessimist but Revolutionary Road makes me think about it… so next time I fiercely believe something regarding a movie experience, I’ll give myself some breathing time.